DHS fights back on REAL-ID privacy complaints
As Danny Glover rallies the opposition, DHS officials tell Congress that they see no relevant privacy issues
More skirmishing over the REAL-ID Act. Readers will recall that the agency has had to confront three dinstinct sets of opponents: the states, which resent the project as a budget-busting unfunded mandate; those who advocate for illegal immigrants, many of whom could be tripped up by the regulations; and the privacy advocates, who see the project as the first steps toward a national ID card who see the technology behind the project to be insufficiently secure. DHS had its hands full with all three last week.
First the National Governors Association wrote a letter to congress asking for a minimum of $1 billion to cover the states’ expenses, and actor Danny Glover appeared at a Missouri rally against the program. Then, finally, senior DHS officials expressed dismay at the concerns of privacy advocates, arguing, in fact, the law would improve citzens’s safety. “You can never foresee the future, but every indication is that REAL-ID is actually going to make it less easy for people to engage in identity theft,” said assistant secretary Stewart Baker recently told Congress, arguing that the program does not create a centralized database of personal information that could be hacked.
This, however, has been well known. The real problem, say privacy advocates, is that the ID may be scanned by non-governmental entities such as banks and restaurants. DHS has ruled that the data will not be encrypted to ease police adoption, and with all the recent problems with credit card scammers hacking commercial credit card readers, there is reason to be worried about the issue.
Stewart is not convinced: “If you impose encryption requirements that make that exchange of information difficult, you’re undermining, not improving, security associated with drivers licenses, we don’t want to do that.” Indeed, it seems DHS is just a big daft on the whole privacy thing. If you do not want to use a REAL-ID standard card to board an airplane, DHS policy wonk Jonathan Frenkel suggests that travelers use their passport for identification. All of the new ones, however, carry RFID chips.
